Kostmayer To Seek Research Funds For Geothermal Energy

January 27, 1992|by KIMBERLY MOORE, States News Service

U.S. Rep. Peter Kostmayer, D-8th District, said last week that he will soon introduce a bill to fund research on geothermal energy, a clean energy source he said can produce 30 times the heat generated by oil and nuclear energy combined.

The congressman said the funding for a year of experiments to produce energy using hot, dry rocks will run out after only three months of testing.

"This is the stupidity we're up against in the Bush administration's proposals," Kostmayer said in an interview. "This energy source is too good to be true."

A spokesman for New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the tests are being conducted, said at a congressional hearing last week that the domestic energy reserves from hot dry rocks alone would replace 17 trillion barrels of oil, enough to supply U.S. energy needs for thousands of years.

Kostmayer said there is a large site in north central Pennsylvania that is capable of producing this type of energy. "Pennsylvania would be a sensible site," he said. "It would create jobs, it's clean and it would support the drilling industry."

Kostmayer is spearheading an effort to bring the nation's second geothermal energy laboratory to Pennsylvania.

The New Mexico testing is scheduled to begin in a few weeks, according to Dave Weiss, a staff member of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee's Energy and the Environment Subcommittee. A series of similar experiments were conducted from 1978 to 1980 and again in 1986, Weiss said.

A laboratory geothermal engineer at Los Alamos said scientists generally drill down several thousand feet to reach the hot dry rocks. "We drill one hole down, pump in water under high pressure which causes the rocks to shift and creates a reservoir," said engineer Don Brown. "It's like pumping water into a box of sugar cubes."

Brown said the water, heated to about 400 degrees Fahrenheit by the rocks, is pumped back to the surface through separate pipes and left under pressure.

"We run it through a heat exchanger to transfer the heat into energy," Brown said. "This is no more sophisticated than mining heat, and it can be used to power homes."

Geothermal energy does not result in an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide or in radioactive water, said Brown, who patented the process. "The concept can be developed anywhere on the Earth's surface, even in Third World countries," he said.

In addition, the geothermally produced electricity is comparatively inexpensive. "It costs about 4 to 6 cents per kilowatt hour," Kostmayer said.

"The administration's refusal to invest in this is a real crime," Kostmayer said. "If we don't provide an adequate level of funding at this crucial stage, this nation's entire investment in (hot dry rocks) may be lost."

The Department of Energy portion of Bush's annual budget last year was about $17 billion, with $242 million going towards alternative energy sources. Hot dry rock experiments are funded by $3.5 million in appropriations.

The Japanese allocate twice the amount the U.S. spends on geothermal research and the Europeans fund even more. The U.S. leads the pack in geothermal technology, but Kostmayer said Japan is expected to surpass the U.S. to become the industry's technological leader by 1995.